I’m shipping up to Boston for Storage Field Day 16

Yes, I’m sorry about the title too. But also glad to announce I’m shipping up to Boston for Storage Field Day 16 this week! Just ignore the fact I’m not on a ship but on a train for now, and all should be well… Next stop is AMS, then a direct flight to BOS. It’s going to be a slightly shorter, two-day Storage Field Day this time around. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to receive a lot less content!

2 days, 7 companies, 12 delegates

It’s going to be an action-packed Wednesday and Thursday, with seven companies presenting. And we’ll be in our normal configuration with 12 scale-out delegates; some veterans, some newbies.

Presenting this week, in order of appearance, are:

SNIA, on NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF). SNIA always amazes us with the amount of influence they have in the industry as a whole. Every presentation to date taught me something new, ranging from tail latency to protocols, so this should be good. With NVMe appearing in nearly all new storage systems, the “over Fabrics”-aspect is a welcome lecture.

StorONE. I hadn’t heard about them before, but that might make sense since they just came out of stealth late last year. They promise to squeeze more performance out of your mid-range storage hardware compared to other storage software, so I’m curious to see how they do that.

Dell EMC will close off Wednesday with two slots, telling us more on PowerMax and CloudIQ. I’m an avid CloudIQ user myself, so I’m very curious to hear about the roadmap.

On Friday we’ll start with Zerto. I’m very interested in how they achieve the Continuous Data Protection, since I’ve only ever worked with the RecoverPoint equivalent. If my information is correct, the Zerto team initially built RecoverPoint and then started a company of their own. So lets see what the similarities are, but also what’s different!

NetApp will be the second presenter of the day, focusing on infrastructure monitoring software…

Finally, Nasuni is going to close of the last day. They are based out of Boston, so it’s a home match for them. I didn’t know them either, but expect they will tell us about enterprise unified scale-out hybrid cloud NAS. That’s a whole lot of buzzwords right there, so as long as there’s not too many “disruption” slides in the deck, I’m thrilled to hear what they do.

Tune in to Storage Field Day 16 online!

If the above line-up got your IT-blood flowing, don’t despair. All presentations are streamed live on the Storage Field Day website. It’s four 2-hour sessions each day, so you can spot me because of the espresso IV drip next to me.

Else, if you want to follow us asynchronously: follow the #SFD16 hashtag on Twitter. Or just subscribe to this list to see all the banter from the Storage Field Day 16 delegates.

I’m looking forward to the next couple of days, and also to see a new US city for the first time. Actually, this will be my first ever visit to the US East Coast. I’m flying out again on Friday afternoon, so I hope I can spot at least a few typical Boston landmarks.